Increasing numbers of solar farms are going ahead without any contractual support from the Government and some of them are based on cooperative or community support
Only absolute mugs could support a community solar scheme with 6% return when the risk-free rate is nearly 5%. It is madness to take that risk with such little reward.
Especially when stock market listed solar investment trusts like NESF, Foresight Solar are yielding 11-13% in dividends.
Your readers deserve to know that you are promoting a very bad deal at 6% for wannabe solar investors .
some people, like myself who has invested £3000 in The Big Solar Coop actually think community solar initiatives are a good idea worth supporting. I'm happy to be called a mug.
10-year treasuries are 4.61%. That’s zero business risk, zero hassle, zero maintenance.
You suggest your readers take the risks of investing in solar but accept a flaky 6% return rather than getting double that yield in the FTSE listed, professionally run and regulated solar investments.
As a follow-up the Big Solar investor documents suggest it is using very questionable maths to project its future revenues.
2024: Capacity 4MW. Income: £136k
2025: capacity 7MW. Income: £351k
2026: capacity 10MW. Income: £788k
Income projected between 2025 and 2028 goes up 6x but capacity goes up 3x.
We are expected to believe this despite the actual curve of forward prices being negative?
WTF? How the fuck can anyone believe this shit?
Why does its operating costs go up 5x by 2027, with only 3x installed capacity? Hell of a lot of inflation predicted there?
Why are the central costs spiralling to high heaven as more capacity is added- massive red flags all over this. Payed interest in 2024 despite making a loss.
Fuck me it’s just dire, absolutely uninvestible.
Did you even look at the figures or did you invest on vibes alone?
Have you considered what the end result would be if solar continues to be deployed up until the point where supply exceeds demand?
At this point solar will have destroyed its own market and when solar is peaking during the day the electricity price will go to zero or negative. At this point only CfDs (or commercial CfDs as co-op have subsided in your example) will keep the profit coming, at the expense of consumers.
Yes, I have discussed this and indeed modeled how much solar pv the system could absorb without much wastage - and it's a big figure - around 30 per cent of total generation - batteries are the key of course for this to happen and solar plus batteries are now very cheap - see my discussion at https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/so-how-much-of-uk-electricity-could
Interesting. I don't share your optimism about the affordability of both solar panels and batteries, the key components which will drive cost are energy and raw materials...both of which don't reduce with production increasing by 50%.
Furthermore you conflate balancing demand from summer to winter with battery storage balancing and these are not compatible. It would also be incredibly expensive to balance power demand even over 1d. Why do you not think market forces aren't encourage battery production? It's easy to see there's a market as the electricity market is transparent and if the capex was low enough then it would be profitable to buy low and sell high.
Finally even if a reasonable amount of balancing was feasible the system still would not work as solar and wind generation woukd be so variable the balancing would not be sufficient to store all excess and provide for all the gaps. Therefore we would be left with a system with wild swings in power cost, from negative prices to obscene prices when the efuels and batteries run out and we need a 100% of energy demand back up system to jump online.
A much more likely effective system would be nuclear + batteries or solar/wind + gas.
That link says nothing about batteries becoming economic.
The hope for batteries to be used in conjunction with wind is also wishful thinking; the wind typically doesn't vary like solar so the wind-battery would have much worse utilisation and therefore have a worse return on investment.
But this post references and reproduced a chart showing the highly economical combination of solar and storage- which is improving as these technologies become cheaper. I would also add that I am not going to carry on referring to points I have already made - it looks like you are just making issues without reading what I have said
Only absolute mugs could support a community solar scheme with 6% return when the risk-free rate is nearly 5%. It is madness to take that risk with such little reward.
Especially when stock market listed solar investment trusts like NESF, Foresight Solar are yielding 11-13% in dividends.
Your readers deserve to know that you are promoting a very bad deal at 6% for wannabe solar investors .
some people, like myself who has invested £3000 in The Big Solar Coop actually think community solar initiatives are a good idea worth supporting. I'm happy to be called a mug.
New investors will be getting robbed at 6%.
10-year treasuries are 4.61%. That’s zero business risk, zero hassle, zero maintenance.
You suggest your readers take the risks of investing in solar but accept a flaky 6% return rather than getting double that yield in the FTSE listed, professionally run and regulated solar investments.
It’s such bad advice. Why would you give it?
As a follow-up the Big Solar investor documents suggest it is using very questionable maths to project its future revenues.
2024: Capacity 4MW. Income: £136k
2025: capacity 7MW. Income: £351k
2026: capacity 10MW. Income: £788k
Income projected between 2025 and 2028 goes up 6x but capacity goes up 3x.
We are expected to believe this despite the actual curve of forward prices being negative?
WTF? How the fuck can anyone believe this shit?
Why does its operating costs go up 5x by 2027, with only 3x installed capacity? Hell of a lot of inflation predicted there?
Why are the central costs spiralling to high heaven as more capacity is added- massive red flags all over this. Payed interest in 2024 despite making a loss.
Fuck me it’s just dire, absolutely uninvestible.
Did you even look at the figures or did you invest on vibes alone?
How can you get your capital out?
Can you even get your capital out?
Jesus , it gets worse the deeper I dig:
"Directors’ shares
Current Directors hold 2350 shares in total"
Big vote of confidence there, the 7 (7!) directors believe in the company so much they invested a whole....2350 quid in it.
Wow.
And check this little nugget out : "Investor Members are
collectively limited to 25% of the total vote"
So you cant even vote the Directors out! The rest of the votes belong to their "volunteers" with zero cash at risk.
JESUS WEPT!
This is absolutely insane.
I called you a mug earlier. I retract that and bestow upon you the title: King of the Mugs.
"Share interest
We aim to pay interest annually on all share capital we have
deployed, at the rate of 2% above the base rate (or 5% if
that’s higher). We anticipate that it will take us around 3 years to meet this target, so in the interim we will offer a
lower rate of interest if surpluses allow."
I wanna bet the leadership here are gonna be invoking that last clause a LOT!
Have you considered what the end result would be if solar continues to be deployed up until the point where supply exceeds demand?
At this point solar will have destroyed its own market and when solar is peaking during the day the electricity price will go to zero or negative. At this point only CfDs (or commercial CfDs as co-op have subsided in your example) will keep the profit coming, at the expense of consumers.
Yes, I have discussed this and indeed modeled how much solar pv the system could absorb without much wastage - and it's a big figure - around 30 per cent of total generation - batteries are the key of course for this to happen and solar plus batteries are now very cheap - see my discussion at https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/so-how-much-of-uk-electricity-could
Interesting. I don't share your optimism about the affordability of both solar panels and batteries, the key components which will drive cost are energy and raw materials...both of which don't reduce with production increasing by 50%.
Furthermore you conflate balancing demand from summer to winter with battery storage balancing and these are not compatible. It would also be incredibly expensive to balance power demand even over 1d. Why do you not think market forces aren't encourage battery production? It's easy to see there's a market as the electricity market is transparent and if the capex was low enough then it would be profitable to buy low and sell high.
Finally even if a reasonable amount of balancing was feasible the system still would not work as solar and wind generation woukd be so variable the balancing would not be sufficient to store all excess and provide for all the gaps. Therefore we would be left with a system with wild swings in power cost, from negative prices to obscene prices when the efuels and batteries run out and we need a 100% of energy demand back up system to jump online.
A much more likely effective system would be nuclear + batteries or solar/wind + gas.
There’s lots of very economic batteries in the pipeline to ensure that little solar generation is wasted up to around 30 percent of total UK generation. See a more recent post https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/batteries-galore-how-green-energy
That link says nothing about batteries becoming economic.
The hope for batteries to be used in conjunction with wind is also wishful thinking; the wind typically doesn't vary like solar so the wind-battery would have much worse utilisation and therefore have a worse return on investment.
But this post references and reproduced a chart showing the highly economical combination of solar and storage- which is improving as these technologies become cheaper. I would also add that I am not going to carry on referring to points I have already made - it looks like you are just making issues without reading what I have said
Not in the link you sent, it graphs address planning permission and the hourly demand vs. solar generation with different scenarios.
I could say the same for you that you ignore most of what I say and just choose one point you'd like to address.